Safety incentives

Thomas A. Smith (1998), in his article What s Wrong with Safety Incentives states  

Safety incentives/rewards create competition and fear within an organization. Although many believe that competition is positive, research dispels this myth. External competition will always exist and it does drive bnsiness to perform better. Internal competition, however, is not positive. It creates winners at all costs. This is trne in both production and safety. For example, an employee may not report an injnry because he/she feels they are spoiling the department s record, which wonld mean no reward, (p. 44) 

The first four points are the subject of most of this volume. The last is essential if the others are to be effective. Employees must think for themselves in order to act safely in hazardous situations. A good safety atmosphere will encourage the use of common sense, self-disdpline, and imagination. A good safety program that stimulates and maintains employee interest in safety can involve 

Incentives might include individual group recognition, publicity, money, and merchandise awards. There are many creative ways to motivate employees. Safety newsletters and publications describe many of these, and safety professionals and employees themselves are rich sources of ideas. 

Inspections help to imcover existing and potential unsafe conditions. Inspections should focus on fact-finding, not fault-finding, so that hazards can be co-operatively identified and corrected before an accident occurs. They can also help to improve operations and so produce higher efficiency, effectiveness, and profitability. 

Both formal and informal inspection programs are important. These programs, the types of items to be inspected, and methods for inspection are described below. 

Plarmed inspections follow established procedures and use checklists for routine items. They can be periodic, intermittent, and general. 

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Clearly, the potential hazard from runaway reactions is reduced by reducing the inventory of material in the reactor. Batch operation requires a larger inventory than the corresponding continuous reactor. Thus there may be a safety incentive to change from batch to continuous operation. Alternatively, the batch operation can be... 

Contract documents should be reviewed. The HASP should reflect and possibly reference contractual agreements. Contract documents can contain much information pertinent to site safety. For example, many contracts contain monetary incentives for completion of site work accident free. If management wishes to share some of this monetary incentive with site workers, the HASP is an excellent vehicle for communicating safety incentive programs. 

Enhance safety incentive system adding Top Ten security expert , Security Qishou honorary title mine workers and their fami-... 

Identify possible safety incentive schemes on a construction site. 

Provide safety incentive awards that involve the family. 

The description at the end of Chapter 1 makes it clear that not all human resource management (HRM) changes necessarily improve safety. HRM policies implemented to eliminate all cost sharing associated with injuries, while they do remove income risk for woikers, also lessen their safety incentive. An example would be policies that ensured that employees on workers compensation elaims made as much money as they would at work. Profit sharing, on the other hand, might increase employees safety awareness. In this ehapter, we review prior analyses of how various HRM practices affeet safety to get a better idea of whieh practices improve safety and which do not. 

Attend safety awards presentations, safety incentive award presentations, and audit opening and closeout meetings. 

Smith, T.A. 1998. What s Wrong with Safety Incentives Professional Safety, p. 44. 

Get your FREE Safety Incentive Kit and learn whrit motivritos workers, how to create an effectivt safety incentive program, and what s working right now in comfjanies across America. 

This article is not intended to convince safety professionals to implement safety recognition or award systems. From all the surveys and discussions I ve been a part of, there are as many opinions on safety incentives systems as there are safety professionals. Some folks hate them, some love them, some are in between, but all have their opinions and everyone is an expert on the subject. This is a forum to give you some facts and information on why gift cards make effective safety awards. 

In the previous chapter we numerically simulated employer and worker safety incentives and workers decisions to file WC claims. In our simulations doubling the WC income replacement rate from its recent historical level would reduce the injury rate by two percent while raising reported injuries by about 30 percent. Our numerical simulations illustrated that when WC benefits increase the actual rate of work-related injuries can fall while the application rate for workers compensation benefits rises. 

A typical relationship in states workers compensation insurance programs is that a 50 percent reduction in WC injury costs produces no change in WC costs for a firm with seven workers, a five percent reduction in the WC costs for a firm with 10 workers, a 17 percent reduction in the WC costs for a firm with 75 workers, a 36 percent decline for a firm with 750 workers, and a 50 percent (dollar-for-dollar) decline in WC costs for a firm with 1750 or more workers (Chelius and Smith, 1987). Premium changes also take four years to take full effect. Because small firms insurance prices do not fall much if they improve their safety small firms safety incentives under WC are limited, and small firms have little reason to contest the severity or genuineness of their workers WC claims. 

Hinze, J. 2002. Safety incentives Do they reduce injuries Practice Periodical on Structural Design and Construction, 7(2), 81—4. 

A serious mistake members of some organizations make is believing they can have two separate systems for evaluating production and safety. This occurs when no measurement for safety is built into the normal evaluation system and a safety incentive program is initiated to reward safe performance. The line manager is rewarded in terms of salary and position for having an exemplary production record. At... 

Identify the pitfalls inherent in safety incentive programs... 

Incentive programs are sometimes used in place of effective safety programs and positive safety cultures. Safety incentive programs are not magic. They may have a negative effect on safety efforts. 

Under this heading come modifications to physical work design and layout, new machinery and work methods, changes in allocation of jobs to people, introduction of new incentive schemes so that different behaviour is rewarded and punished (e.g. payment schemes, promotion systems, direct safety incentives or simply what behaviour elicits praise from the boss), changes to safety rules, company policy or legal standards. 

In practice, of course, even the limited safety incentives inherent in the model are illusory. Workers do not have any satisfactory way of assessing risks and making cost/benefit calculations (Slovic, Fischhoff and Lichtenstein 1985). Indeed, they may be quite unaware of the risks. And if the risks concern matters of health (e.g. cancer), where the costs may have to be borne years later, these costs may be discounted in ways which lead to outcomes which are very far from optimal for the individual worker. Furthermore, the costs will be borne not only by the worker concerned but also by members of his or her family, who may have had no part in the original decision, and by the wider society, which is called upon to provide health services, disability pensions and the like. 

One important study in this tradition avoids this problem. Moore and Viscusi (1989) relate benefit levels not to lost-time injury claims but to fatality rates. The reporting of fatalities is presumably not affected by the level of benefits and consequently, they argue, any relationship can be assumed to reflect safety incentive effects rather than reporting effects. The authors in fact find a strong negative relationship between benefit (and hence premium) levels on the one hand and fatality rates on the other, thus lending support to the hypothesis that experience rating works to make employers more safety conscious. 

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